A full-size mockup of the construction system used for the Kakamigahara Crematorium

The
floor of the main space is a field of undulating white
dunes.

It has been almost a decade since Toyo Ito
began to publicly express concern about his influence
on the younger generation of Japanese architects. Ito
is deservedly celebrated for his embrace of the effects
of electronic and information technology on the contemporary
city, his theorization of the concomitant effects on human
life as a "virtual body," and of course his
poetic built expressions of transparency and weightlessness.
Yet in 1998, he published an essay critical of the anemic
minimalism of new Japanese architecture that included
this admission:

"Of course, many of these characteristics apply to
my own architecture, and I am aware that due to my advocacy
of lightness, ephemerality and transparency, I must bear
some of the responsibility for this syndrome among my
colleagues born only twenty years after me." (1)

This appeared shortly after construction had begun on
the Sendai Mediatheque, the epochal project that sealed
Ito's reputation as the definitive architect of the cyberspace
era, yet simultaneously triggered his turn toward structural
and material reality. According to the architect himself,
this change in direction was caused by seeing his sketches
of diaphanous, swaying webs materialize on the Mediatheque
building site as enormous, rigid steel cages. His work
since then is by no means a return to conventional building
types, but rather the reinvigoration of a design approach
that, in our cyber-saturated culture, had begun to run
the risk of cliché.

The astonishing results are currently on display at the
Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, in an exhibition aptly entitled
The New "Real" in Architecture. Although
one wall is devoted to a chronological history of Ito's
entire body of work, the rest of the show is from the
post-Mediatheque period. One room focuses on his competition-winning
project for the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, an
unprecedented reconceptualization of every aspect of an
opera house. Another room contains nothing but a full-size mockup of the
construction system used for the Kakamigahara Crematorium, a vast
undulating shell surface that seems free in form, but was realized
via rigorous structural analysis -- a computer-aided, nonlinear
revision of Antonio Gaudi's experiments with catenary curves and
other natural geometries, achieved by Ito through close collaboration
with engineer Mutsuro Sasaki. Indeed, together with the ghost of
Gaudi, Sasaki is a constant presence throughout the show.

The floor of the main space is a field of undulating white
dunes (visitors must remove their shoes), embedded in
which are models large enough to project a sense of their
intended materiality and spatiality. These are innovative
and expressive constructions based on natural archetypes
such as trees, mollusks, ripples, and caves, all with
an overt weight and structural logic. Far more evocative
than a conventional array of architectural miniatures
viewed as if from a helicopter, each model has a few sunken
holes around it to allow lower, more realistic sightlines.
The room is bracketed by a full-size mockup showing the
construction process of the Tod's Building structural
walls.

One corner of the gallery contains a display of furniture
items Ito designed for the Italian manufacturer Horm.
For the opening of the exhibition, an incomplete Ripple
bench had been brought over from Italy together with an
artisan who spent the evening fastidiously hand-carving
the wood, oblivious to the crowd. Toyo Ito's swerve away
from his earlier surreal and immaterial visions was beautifully
symbolized by the solid, heavy reality of this labor of
love.